A time capsule of the greatest financial mania in the history of mankind, told in real-time by regular folks and patriots. May future generations better understand the madness of crowds, and how power and money corrupt.

November 24, 2006

Anyone else feeling it's all hitting the fan right about now, spinning so out of control our incompetent and clueless government will just have to move to the sidelines as Rome burns?

Militiamen grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive as Iraqi soldiers stood by, and seven Sunni mosques came under attack as Shiites took revenge for the slaughter of at least 215 people in the Sadr City slum.

Home sales tumbled nationally by 12.7% in third quarter, 115,568 properties nationwide entered some stage of foreclosure during October, the most reported in any month so far this year and an increase of 42 percent from October 2005 ~ California reports highest number of foreclosures for second straight month ~ fasten your seat belts / Recession draws near

21 comments:

Agree - I said that this morning before reading your blog - dollar down, oil/gold up, foreclosures hit 1 million and up to records, and Iraq now in full scale civil war that even Bush can't deny. Wait until Iraq nuts start bombing their own oil pipelines again. . .I predicted here on HP way back that the DOW will tank to 9800 by Dec. 31, and I hold to that. We had an early false "Santa Clause Rally" and now the "Grinch that Stole Christmas" will appear. . .fund managers will catch the drift, and lock in their profits for the year, bringing down the market, and then it will feed upon itself. . .recession is now 99% sure for 2007.

BTW - I AM a fund manager - a small family trust fund of 5 million, but I have already locked in a lot of profits for the year, and am holding long in Gold, and bond funds, etc. . .a few well placed utilities with great dividends, and bought lots of Canadian Oil trusts a few weeks ago when they tanked because of the new tax proposals in Canada (have already booked a profit on those). . .out of ANY technology and consumer stocks!!!

Not only do i blame the Neo-con agenda for what we are about to recive IE:(recession) But I also blame the people for falling into the trap of more is good, and bigger is better..you would have thought we learned from that in the 80's but obviously not..oh well Ill watch..and hopfully learn something from this experiance..maybe others will follow and watch and learn...but i wont hold my breath, gota have things more things.

To understand who he was, you have to go back to another time when the world was powered by the black fuel and the deserts sprouted great cities of pipe and steel. Gone now swept away. For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all.

Without fuel they were nothing. They built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked. But nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. The cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men.

On the roads it was a white line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed.

Except for one man armed with an AK-47, and a Honda full of silver. In the roar of an engine, he lost everything and became a shell of a man, a burnt out, desolate man, a man haunted by the demons of his past. A man who wandered out into the wasteland. And it was here in this blighted place that he learned to live again.

Last year I quit my job and decided to take 2 weeks in Nepal before starting a new gig. My flight was from NY to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Singapore, then Singapore to Nepal. Well, I worked and worked all throught the last week to finish things up, and on the last day worked 12 hours before rushing to the airport with my bags. I was so busy, I don't think I had crapped in over 24 hours. Eight hours and many beers later, we touched down in Frankfurt and I had about 40 mins before my connection, I walked through the terminal to a mens room and quickly found a stall. Of course, like any airport shitter, I had to use a lot of paper to clean off the seat (god I wish people could just be decent to the seats and not piss on them). Anyhow, once I squatted, a horrendously foul stew of solid, liquid and gas began spewing forth from my sphincter. It's was piles and piles of bad news that wouldn't stop, and with every clump came an accompanying overture of hisses, dribbles, and pops. After 2 or 3 minutes of steady delivery, I began to hear German guys saying something about my performance. I couldn't understand their language but the tone wrang through. "Oh my god, what did he eat, oh the smell is lethal, phew, that is the worst shit I've ever heard," and so on. Then I could hear other languages chime in. French and Russians alike were suffering together under the wrath of my bowels. It was like a UN Security Council decrying my disgusting dukey. I was so proud! After that, I washed my hands and went to Nepal.

Mark in San Diego said... Agree - I said that this morning before reading your blog - dollar down, oil/gold up, foreclosures hit 1 million and up to records, and Iraq now in full scale civil war that even Bush can't deny.-----------

Who were they? Falling like stricken angels. Were they ghosts of the past or ghosts of the future? They're ghosts, though, to be sure, airbrushed out of the highly polished 9/11 myth.

But the first thing I thought when I saw them, plunging live on television, I instantly thought of the Great Depression.

Because it had phantom jumpers too. Men who'd watched their personal economy and those of the people who'd put their trust in them evaporate like so much spilled gasoline on a hot patch of Texas blacktop. And what became of them, these proto-Eichmanns? Their names, like the dollars they bled, became dust.

When those of us who are old enough to remember 9/11 talk about the event, if discussion turns to jumpers the programmed social response is to say "oh my god - can you imagine how horrible it must have been, for them to have decided to take their own lives?" As though this somehow makes the argument that the buildings were cut down with thermite less convincing. Any way you slice it, it was a terrible day for everybody.

But the jumpers in the Great Depression had no smoking ruin of a building quaking beneath them. The had no caustic deep-tissue burns from liquefied iron girders or blunt force trauma from exploding masonry. They had no smoke inhalation issues, just numbers on a piece of paper. And those numbers were so evil that they made the men jump.

And that's what the invisible jumpers of 9/11 portend. A coming terrible day where we will not see the spectacular public suicides of the corporate middle oligarchy because they'll die behind unbreakable corporate office tower windows, their corporate masters saved the embarrassment by our futuristic building codes. Because the numbers on our balance sheets are turning evil again, but we've learned to let ourselves feign ignorance of the gritty reality of our past.